Some time ago, the largest transaction ever in terms of dollar value was made on the Bitcoin blockchain.
It was a transaction involving 161,500 BTC, worth over $1.1 billion.
In reality, it was just a transfer of BTC between two wallets owned by the Bitfinex exchange, as confirmed by Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino himself.
Indeed, when examining the transaction on the explorer, it can be observed that the 161,500,99956979 BTC moved were sent from one address to two other addresses, one of which is the same address as the sender.
In fact, 15,000 BTCs were sent to another address, while the remaining 146,500,99956979 BTCs were sent to the same address as the sender.
According to Ardoino’s statement, it was only a matter of moving 15,000 BTC to the cold wallet, while the rest remained at the same address.
In any event, the fee for this transaction was only about $0.70, which is absolutely insignificant compared to the transferred value.
Given the current exchange rate, this would be the largest BTC transaction ever made in all of Bitcoin‘s history in terms of dollar value.
The previous record in this respect dates back to September 2019, when about $1 billion worth of BTC was moved.
Considering instead the largest ever transactions in terms of volume of BTC moved, the biggest one was on November 16th, 2011, when as many as BTC 500,000 were transferred.
However, at that time the dollar value of bitcoin was so low, that the volume of that transaction was only $1.3 million, just over one-thousandth of the Bitfinex transaction.
In November 2013, the second-largest bitcoin transaction ever was made, when nearly 195,000 BTC were transferred.
At that time, the value of bitcoin had already grown a lot, such that the volume in dollars was about 149 million dollars, more than a tenth of the Bitfinex transaction.
In March 2014 the third-largest bitcoin transaction ever (180,000 BTC) took place, and in January 2019 the fourth one was executed, with 130,000 BTC which at that time were already worth about 475 million dollars.
